I have a check-up with my primary physician tomorrow. It should be a hoot.
April 2014
April.
I am looking outside and marveling at the fact that it is the 30th of April. It is currently 42ºF. Rain is falling in buckets. The wind is blowing at 24 MPH. During the month of April I believe we have had maybe 5 days that have been April-like. To celebrate the arrival of May tomorrow, I moved my autumn wardrobe back into my closet. I am wearing a dark green shirt with orange and brown stripes. If there were any leaves on the trees they’d probably be ready to fall.
To say that I am frustrated by this streak of underwhelming weather would be an understatement. By this time last year I had a couple of hundred miles on my bicycle. This year I have clocked in a whopping 10.62 miles. I am not amused.
As a private pilot I logged more flight time during the winter months than I have thus far this spring. Something is amiss with that equation and I find it disheartening. I am so very close to making my next aviation goal, but I can rarely find weather conditions that are conducive to practicing landings and the like. I desperately try to not get depressed about it, but it feels like my winter blahs are lingering a bit longer this year.
This morning I asked Earl if he had any job opportunities in San Diego. He does not. I’m starting to wonder if they need ditch diggers on the Panama Canal.
One of the special treats about this weather is that our cat is still trying to go in and out of the back patio door as if he hadn’t a care in the world. He spends approximately 46 seconds on either side of the door at any given time, before wanting to move to the opposite side of the door. This could be adding to the frustration I am feeling with this weather.
During my chiropractor visit yesterday, the doc mentioned that the forecast showed this weather continuing for the next 10 days. He then marveled that my back seemed tighter than usual. Of course it is, this crap makes me tense.
I started my “winter vitamins” again this morning with the hope of boosting up my Vitamin D levels. I don’t know if they’re low or not but extra Vitamin D can sometimes feel like sunshine in a friendly capsule.
Plus, they’re less calories than beer.
I was doing some random reading on the web earlier this week and a conspiracy site suggested that President Obama had the Jet Stream relocated. They had a brief discussion about how fighter jets were used to latch onto the Jet Stream and pull it further south to combat the effects of Global Warming. Aside from trying to figure out how one would actually latch onto the Jet Stream, I briefly bemused the thought of anyone in the U.S. Government doing anything that would require any sort of imagination. And then I was amused by the fact that someone suggested that the U.S. Government did anything at all. That’s a funny one, right there. If the Jet Stream can’t pay taxes, why would they drag it farther down south?
The furnace just kicked on to combat the opening and closing of the patio door so Sir Indecisive can go out and make sure that the plants are still accommodating to his litter box habits. I’m going to go put on a sweater.
Clicked.
Something in my head clicked last week and I’m finding myself to be a lot more relaxed. I don’t know if it was two days off from work, the trip to Chicago last weekend or a recent trip to North Carolina, but I shan’t fret about the trivialities. Perhaps it’s the arrival of spring in these parts. Whatever the reason, I’m not nearly spun as I have been for the past few months and this is a good thing.
It’s good to feel a smile on my face.
Confession.
So I have a little bit of a confession to make. As I’ve mentioned on here before, Scooter moved in with us at the end of January. We don’t know much about what Scooter did before he ended up in a friend’s barn over the winter, but he seems to have had a few adventures. He has a skittish side and he has some habits that indicate that he lived outside for a long while, for example, he still gobbles his food down at an alarming rate.
I have been concerned that Scooter is lonely here. He often seems bored and when he’s bored he gets into all sorts of mischief. If there is a door between us and him he is very loud about his discontentment with this. He is still learning the basics of staying off of kitchen counters and the table. He’s still figuring out how sleep works in that if he’s not screaming about our bedroom door being closed, he’s ramming around the bed at all hours of the night and trying to leap onto as many elevated surfaces as possible. Last night he ran up and down the piano keyboard a few times. I couldn’t figure out the tune.
During a particularly frustrating moment I decided that he wasn’t very happy here and I thought about finding him a new home. I even put together an ad for Craig’s List. While I read over my description on the “review” screen before submitting the ad to the popular site, I looked at the photo I had selected of him and found that I just couldn’t do it. I don’t give up on people and I’m not a quitter, so I certainly wasn’t about to give up on Scooter. I found myself misty-eyed and I deleted the ad before submitting it. It was at that moment that I decided that the latest feline in the family had won my heart and that we would have to come to an understanding.
Yesterday I installed a sleep mat for him near my desk in my home office so he could relax while I worked. His new vantage point allows him to keep an eye on the proceedings. Yesterday morning (before the bad weather moved in) I gave him some outdoors time so he could engage in his spring fever ways. Last night’s sleep cycle was good, but not great, but it showed improvement. Last night when I mentioned to Earl that I had contemplated the Craig’s List maneuver, I was scolded for thinking of such a thing. He’s still get used to us and we’re still getting used to him and that’s all there is to it.
I guess we still have some mutual training to do. But I’m not giving him up and I wouldn’t trade him in or exchange him for another. And that’s something for everyone to purr about.
Code Review.
Struggling with a piece of code today, my assistant was helpful until he decided to lay down on my desk.
Exploration.
A certain someone of the feline persuasion just ventured outside (with supervision) for the first time since moving into our happy little home a couple of months ago. Scooter is still getting his routine around here down; he hasn’t figured out the differences between “meal time” and “sleep” and he’s an early riser (breakfast at 3:00 a.m. anyone?), but he’s starting to get his bearings.
Since today is the first time it has been above 60ºF this year, I thought I’d spend a little time out on the front porch during my lunch hour. I motioned for Scooter to come out with me, but he didn’t want any part of the shenanigans I was engaging in, so he scooted around the house at a high rate of speed. He then realized that I was still on the front porch.
There’s a saying about cats and curiosity…
Anyway, it only took two rattles of the front porch door to get the human to get up from his comfortable position in the sun and let Mr. Scooter outside, but when I went to open the door, Scooter ran back. I decided to leave the front door open and let him come out on his own. It took a bit and the steps were filled with trepidation, but he finally came out to where I was sitting on the steps. He made a few cursory checks of the area through his very active nose and then decided he had had enough and starting ripping around the house again.
Apparently all of this activity has deemed him worthy of a nap. He is now relaxing and undoubtedly pondering his exploratory mission of the day.
Readers.
Since the beginning of the year I have noticed a marked decrease in the number of entries on many of the personal blogs I read, my blog here included. I have spoken about this before and I still attribute this shift to the rise of social media, namely Facebook and Twitter and the like. I’ve wondered if our increasing expectations of immediacy and short blasts of information in life are fueled by the instantaneous nature of social media or vice-versa. Whatever the reason, I’m sure they are here to stay for a while.
Another contributing factor to the decline in personal blogs is the shuttering of Google Reader a while back. Google Reader was an excellent aggregator of RSS feeds, or blog data, and when Google shut down the application they did a real (purposeful) disservice to the blogging community. Google Reader was thorough in its capabilities. I have tried other services, Feedly and a couple of others, but I reinstalled my own copy of Tiny Tiny RSS, a Google Reader-like aggregator that runs on one’s own web server space.
When I was looking for a solution to replace Google Reader I found Feedly too cumbersome with its way of organizing incoming feeds; Tiny Tiny RSS fits the void left by Google Reader quite well.
I don’t know who still reads me blog but by whatever method you have arrived, I’m appreciative of the fact that you read my ramblings. Though I routinely contemplate the closing down of this blog, in the long run I feel that I still have much more than 140 characters to say.
So I guess I’ll just keep on doing what I’m doing.
Steps.
I have had a life-changing experience this week. It’s a small thing, but sometimes a very small thing can have a very large impact on one’s life. This change, this modification, has significantly improved my comfort and added a most pronounced spring to my step.
For the first time in 45 years, I have altered the way I lace up my shoes.
If you look closely, you’ll notice that my laces go straight across, instead of the criss-cross method I’ve used since mastering the art of tying my shoes during my first months of kindergarten.
When I learned to tie my shoes, there was something about the bunny going around the tree and jumping through a hoop to make his own hoop. I never understood the logistics of all this imagery, and quite frankly, I was labeled as “possibly development disabled” because I entered kindergarten without being able to tie my shoes. I didn’t color within the lines, either and I also committed the cardinal sin of “jamming” my homework into my book bag. I just think Mrs. Mosher (“no child is any different from any other child”) didn’t know what to do with me since I obviously didn’t fit into her stereotypical expectations. Clearly, I was too fabulous.
I’m digressing.
Once I mastered tying my shoes during those first shaky weeks of kindergarten, I celebrated by watching a girl named Tanya cut off her bangs with the construction paper scissors whilst I ate paste.
Calm down, I’m joking and still digressing. I’m joking about the paste. Tanya did cut her hair and I have no idea why she did that.
Actually, once I mastered tying my shoes I chalked that up to a philosophy that I still obey to this day: “set it and forget it.” The thing is, I like my shoes tied really tight and with that whole criss-cross method that I learned back in 1973, I ended up with pain in the top of my feet that has gotten worse over the years. I’m not cutting off my circulation or anything, because my doctor was overly enthusiastic about the fact that you can take and SEE my pulse in my feet (it’s not gross or anything), but at the end of the day in my dress shoes or my pilot shoes (pictured above), I’ll feel the pain associated with the dent in the top of my foot from my tightly tied shoes.
Enter the Internet. Now, I’m not much of a foot guy (though years ago I did know a guy who loved my boots to the point of really loving my boots) but as I grow older I try to find a sophisticated sense of style and apparently there’s a better way to tie one’s shoes.
In fact, this site features 41 ways to lace up shoes, and after careful analysis, I have settled in on “straight bar” lacing.
My shoes are still tight but I no longer have the high amount of pressure pressing down on the top of my foot. This morning I was able to walk six miles before work and my feet never complained once about my shoes being too tight. They felt very comfortable and very solid.
This makes me a happy man.
Goals.
So today my new position at work and I am very excited about. My new title is “Senior Systems Engineer” and I’m basically doing more of what I love to do for work, writing applications for people to be more efficient in their job. The company I work for strives to “delight our customers” and I firmly believe in that value; I strive to “delight my customer”, which is the application user. I always have a goal to make things better.
I’ve also been working on my aviator goals: a couple of weeks ago I flew to Oswego County Airport with my instructor and a fellow student. It was great flight and a great learning experience but it was also important to me because of the familial significance of that airport. Landing where my dad and my grandfather had landed was a goal that I needed to reach and landing where my dad last flew was a hurdle I needed to get beyond. I am more energized and more excited than ever to fly now that I have accomplished that goal.
Last week I told my flight instructor and fellow students that I have some aviation goals in mind and one of them is flying into Oshkosh AirVenture in the Piper Cherokee that we co-own. That’s not going to happen this year; it’s way too early in my flight career to do something like that, but it is something that I would love to try in an upcoming year. Earl was mentioning at dinner the other night that he doesn’t want to fly in circles around our home airport, he wants to see things and go places. I’m lucky to have a spouse that thinks like I do.
Because it’s my goal to do the exact same thing.
Here’s a video of someone else landing at Oshkosh last year. Seeing this video just doubled my excitement for doing the same thing someday.
Market.
Our local grocery store of choice is in the process of remodeling. This is sort of a big deal in our happy little home, because Earl does the majority of the grocery shopping for our home and he has a certain way of doing it. I dare not blame this certain way on the fact that he’s getting older, I just like to think that’s he very well organized in all facets of his life and these organizational skills manifest themselves throughout everyday tasks.
The local market was originally built to be a combination of a grocery store and one of those warehouse type places. When it was in this configuration, all the aisles went the wrong direction: looking into the store from the front, the aisles ran left to right instead of front to back. This used to throw us both off but at the time it was better than the option across the street, where the aisles ran at 90 degrees to each other but at a 45 degree angle to the front registers, hence a bunch of “V”s. We couldn’t handle that, so we dealt with the back and forth aisles instead.
When the warehouse concept failed, the market was reconfigured into your standard supermarket, albeit kind of big. The roominess of the building was appreciated though, because it felt very open and airy and you could fit three carts across in an aisle and not worry about Edna and Beatrice blocking the aisle since they were usually chatting to one side.
With this latest remodel they are reducing the size of the store by nearly 30,000 square feet. The place is in shambles and it feels cramped. They’ve eliminated the “Nature’s Place” section where they had healthy alternatives for the crap that they hock elsewhere. The gourmet cheeses, the salad bar, all gone. For all intents and purposes, this supermarket is in the process of becoming your average, run-of-the-mill grocery store with nothing remarkable about it, except for one thing: their prices are still a little higher than the competition’s. Since there’s no reason to pay premium prices without a premium experience, I decided to introduce Earl to another market in the other direction from home.
Here is my husband investigating his new marketing digs.
Overall, the experience was a success and I made a promise that I would try to start accompanying Earl on these shopping excursions. Honestly, I wish that we had a Wegmans in the area, but alas we don’t, so we make do with what we have.
